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Notes -
The New York Times just published an article on a trans study not being published for ideological reasons (Archive)
Has anyone else noticed a clear "vibe shift" on trans issues recently? It would have been unimaginable for this article to be published in the New York Times just a few years ago, but now, it just seems like part of an overall trend away from trans ideologues.
I'm am curious where this trend continues. Is it going to go all the way? Will trans issues be seen as the weird 2010s, early 2020s political project that had ardent supporters, but eventually withered away and died like the desegregation bussing movement? Or will it just settle into a more moderate position of never using any medication on children, but allowing adults to do whatever? Or maybe it is just a temporary setback and the ideologues will eventually win out?
Also of note, trans issues are coming to SCOTUS again. The issue presented is
I recommend reading Alabama's amicus curiae brief for an in depth critique of WPATH. SCOTUS is set to hear oral arguments on this case on the 4th of December, so this is lining up to be an interesting oral argument to listen to. SCOTUS usually releases the big controversial cases at the end of their term, so the opinion on this case will probably be released in the summer of '25.
Funny you ask, I noticed something a year and a half ago.
A question that intruiges me as well. My guess is that that it will be entirely forgotten the same way that the pedo rights movement of the 70's was. Sure every once in a while someone will dig out some receipts, and it will be seen as that weird thing that apparently happened in the past, but it will not be something pinnable on the progressive movement
According to the brief you mentioned, WPATH is sitting on like a dozen of those. I posted about it too.
I wonder about this. Unlike the 70s or any time before the 21st century, the dialogue and commentary around this is largely done on the internet, which is very easily accessible. Memory holing something that can be looked up with a single click of a hyperlink on your phone is harder than doing so for something you'd have to look up old newspapers or journals in a library.
Yet it certainly seems doable. Stuff like the Internet Archive can be attacked and taken down or perhaps captured, thus removing credible sources of past online publications. People could also fake past publications in a way to hid the real ones through obscurity. Those would require actual intentional effort, but the level of effort required will likely keep going down due to technological advancements. More than anything, human nature to be lazy and ambivalent about things that don't directly affect them in the moment seems likely to make it easy to make people forget.
I wonder how much people in the 20th century and before were saying "We're on the right side of history" as much as people have been in the past 15 years. Again, people saying that has never been as well recorded as it has now. It'd be interesting to see in the 22nd century and later some sort of study on all instances of people saying "this ideology is on the right side of history" and seeing how those ideologies ended up a century later.
Suppression of undesired facts is entirely possible without Minitrue-style erasure and rewriting. It can be done pretty much as effectively with but a single word:
"Ew."
If it's common knowledge that anyone who'd even begin to question the default narrative is Gross, Icky, and Super-Low-Status, then people won't listen to challengers no matter how much evidence they bring. (In fact, bringing more evidence just makes it worse, because that "proves what obsessed sickos they are.")
Not to put too fine a point on it, but isn't this is how "HBD" is handled? The awful IQ statistics are still out there, neither erased nor rewritten, but to even wonder if they might exist and show anything contrary to the default narrative is to be declared racist, deserving exile.
While this doesn't perfectly erase anything, it does ensure that any dissent on the matter is scoured out of polite society and limited to - well - thrice-banished communities like this one. Probably it's less risky to use sheer social force like this than to attempt an outright cover-up and risk being caught in the act.
I know this method works, at least for a time, because it worked on me. I did not look into HBD deliberately and I still have an aversion to looking in detail lest I be an "obsessed sicko." I can only wonder how many other things I avoid without realizing it.
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